Disobey! by Frederic Gros

Perhaps also “Non-delegable Selves”…

1. Each person fearfully obeys his hierarchical superior, right up to the tyrant who alone decides. But this vertical representation masks the horizontal chain of complicities, and the portion of pleasurable condolence that each is offered in a tyrannical regime. The main reason why people tolerate being tyrannized is that they are offered the pleasure of themselves tyrannizing others: ‘The despot subdues his subjects, some of them by means of others.’ What gives tyranny a hold is its ‘democratic’ structure. Each tyrannized person takes revenge for their condition by themselves being tyrannical towards others, with the result that the relationship of obedience, far from forming two separate groups (rulers and ruled), pervades the entire social body; and all are complicit in it, each taking their share of pleasure from being authorized to act the tyrant towards another.

I do not even ask you to disobey, simply that you begin to stop obeying, at least to cease ‘surplus obedience’.

2. Disobeying does not just mean appealing to a higher legitimacy, maintaining that one obeys other laws; it means challenging the very principle of legitimacy. Disobedience can contain a portion of pure transgression…

3. The first priority is not obedience to laws, conformity to rules, but the preservation and safeguarding of one’s own principles. Each person, inasmuch as they truly exist, must let themselves be guided by their conscience rather than blindly and passively obeying the laws. Thoreau gives this duty an intransigent stamp. Disobedience is not even a rationally deduced right, it is a duty of spiritual integrity.

4. It was Socrates who addressed his compatriots and told them: I see how readily you care for your wealth, your reputations, your pleasures. But do you really care for your self?.15 This self is not the egoistic ‘me’ of privileges, nor again the intimate, deep, secret ‘me’, the speciality of psychologists of personal development, to be discovered and conquered in its authenticity below the veneer of education and the carapace of socialization. The self in question here, the object and content of Socratic care, is the ‘foundation’ from which I authorize myself to accept or refuse a certain order, decision or action. It is the lever of disobedience.

5. What makes us disobey is thinking thought, critical work. Socratic examination requires this thinking thought, rather than a thought thought (the lesson one recites, the dogma one repeats). By this, I mean that each person has to strive to position themselves at the root of the question, their thought being inspired only as an echo of this appeal. Prevent oneself from reciting recipes, bleating out learned formulas, applying ready-made solutions, receiving passive self-evident truths – and instead, trust the hesitations of conscience. Once again, the principle of non-delegable responsibility: no one can think in your place, no one can respond in your place.

This thinking thought that is not found in books is actually anterior to the distinction between obeying and disobeying. Or, rather, it is naturally, structurally, primitively disobedient, if obeying means following another person’s lesson. The transcendental ethic of politics is experience of the non-delegable. No one can think in my place, respond in my place, decide in my place, disobeJankélévitchy in my place.

6. To think is to disobey, to disobey one’s certainties, one’s comfort, one’s habits.

7.  By caring so much for your ego, do you not risk forgetting yourself?